Still. Silent. Pervasive

Menu

Post navigation

Truth : The Subtle Body

Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is indisputable that each one of us live life in the experience … that sight, taste, sound, touch and smell raise within us. How we feel with the sensation defines our experience of the world, the body, the vitality and the mind, in that moment. The experience is ours; we are the agent, the ego, who lives and categorise it as good or bad, happy or miserable and, by extension, judge that phenomenal object that we physically interacted with; or which stimulated our vital being, firing up an emotion; or that thought which sets our mental being up or down; or the realisation that clarifies our perspective or casts it in doubt.

Every experience is felt in the vitality. It either adds to the subconscious memory, if without an intellectual content, or gives a churn to our knowledge base that we are subsequently aware. There is a gradation of experience along the gross to subtle axis, between the material or the physical and the mental or spiritual. Human beings are denied a purely physical experience, like rain drops falling on the tree or a stone being eroded with flowing waters, because we have a developed nerve-brain system that offers passage for a two-way interaction between the physical and the mental. We feel the material in our vital being and have emotions expressive of our judgement and will about the felt experience.

Most emotions come into our mental frame and pass away. Happy feelings are without our greed for more. Ones that are pleasant or joyous obtain our preference, and the will to retain and add more of them in our lives. That will is in our vital being, if not always in our articulated thought, and has a future : happy or sad. Misery and unhappiness affect us in accord with our capacity to bear, skills actually that our emotion quotient reflects. Some raise a revulsion, and a will, that turns us into rebels, a lifelong activist, acause celebere. It is preceded by intense interaction within our subtle being, between our knowledge self and the vital-mental flared up being.

That how we are, as life goes. We are at the head of this subtle being inclusive of vital-mental and the intellectual self. It is subtle, invisible to others and often to ourself. Properly speaking, its constituents are : the five senses, not organs; the five-fold vitality – prana, apana, vyama, samana and udana; the four-fold mind – chitta, manas, buddhi and ahankara.

We are the subtle being, mostly unknown to others and usually in our own unawareness. Our relationship with other things and living beings brings out our subtle content the most, especially with ones we value or love. In the distance that time or our skill puts, they reveal us to ourself.

Our subtle being is our heaven and our hell. It is verily the “kshetra,” the action-experience field of individual consciousness that Bhagvad Gita describes. It is full of compulsions, on a massive viscous momentum from before. The force of inevitability it carries is best observed in animals, as indeed most of us humans are most of the time.

The subtle being never dies. It can only be transcended. That is scarce because the effort reuired to go against the flow, that momemntum from before, is herculean. The good news is that the effort can be summoned by everyone. But the commitment is ours : to choose a life of electable choice, starting with one.